The one tour Roger Waters called the worst idea in the world: “I can’t think of anything I want to do less”
Roger Waters never tried to make music that was too nostalgic.
He liked moving forward on every single release, and since there was a lot of baggage that came with going back into his past, he knew there was no real point in digging up a lot of the old wounds that he had gone through when working with Pink Floyd for decades at a time. Far too many bridges had been burned for him to get sentimental, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still appreciate the occasional performance with his mates all over again.
Live 8 already felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for every single Floyd fan, and the magic wasn’t lost on Waters. The idea of getting the four classic members back onstage in 2005 would have felt impossible back in the 1990s, but if they could find time to come together for charitable causes, it looked like some of the waters had been calmed between the members. But when it came to going out on tour, David Gilmour was the one who most frequently said no whenever they got the opportunity.
Waters did have a bit of fondness for getting back with his musical brothers again when he performed, but even he admitted that his ideas for shows didn’t revolve around going around the world again and again. He didn’t see the appeal of having the same kind of performance for weeks on end, but if they were up for doing one-off shows, that would have been the perfect middle ground for him.
If anything, the fact that Nick Mason is still touring with his band A Saucerful of Secrets is probably the closest that people will come to seeing what the real Floyd would have sounded like back in the day. Mason might be the only main member of the band that’s in the lineup, but given how Guy Pratt has worked with the Waters-less Floyd and has turned in time with Mason’s group, it’s not like some of the magic isn’t there to a certain degree.
And even Waters could admit that Mason’s band did have a lot of great moments. Some of their sets even included a full performance of ‘Echoes’, and while Waters did have enough affection for the group to approve of what they did and even perform with them during one-offs for a rendition of ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, there was no way that he was going to roll over and give the fans a half-hearted version of those psychedelic tunes one night after another.
That band that he had formed back in the late 1960s was gone, and while he could play the odd tune, it felt like the worst idea in the world for him to go back on tour like that, saying, “I’m writing new shit all the time. I will go on doing what I’ve always done. My work is to think, ‘Well, how can I make rock & roll more interesting or theatrical or exciting or visual or musical or whatever?’”
“That’s what I’ve spent the last 50 years doing, expressing myself. And I shall continue to do that. I can’t think of anything I want to do less than go and sing ‘Set the Controls’ in a pub.”
Roger Waters
To be fair, Waters has been adamant about moving into different territories, but the idea of him playing a different tour of his old hits would have been much better than whatever the hell he was doing on his redo of Dark Side of the Moon. That project felt like a giant middle finger to what the band had originally made, and the idea of playing tunes like ‘Set the Controls’ instead of hearing the gravelly version of ‘Money’ would have been a much better alternative than what we eventually got.
But Waters isn’t really one to apologise for making some of the more controversial choices of his career. He was well aware that he was making music that wasn’t going to appeal to absolutely everybody, and even if he liked the idea of stretching himself on every single record he made, there was no way that he was going to keep digging up pieces of his past for the rest of his life, either.
